Unraveled
by cafe4deux
Summary: A work in progress. Misato seeks to rectify despair with determination in a tale of timeline manipulation, its consequences and manias. Part one online. Further portions dependent upon reader interest.


Dear fanfic lovers:  
  
Herein is my fourth and most ambitious attempt at a fanfic, so ambitious in fact that it has yet to endure a conclusion. This first glimpse into a desperate time travel adventure which witnesses Misato as anti-hero parallels my own desperation to conquer a task posed to me by a friend. Please offer feedback, especially the kind that will persuade me either to finish or to abandon an ill-conceived notion. The following is fairly raw and so please be gentle on plot points and the like. I realize work is needed. CC, rants, raves are accepted. Praise, encouragement welcomed.  
  
begin story  
  
Shinji was dead.  
  
More to the point: Shinji offed himself in a three-megaton explosion.  
  
From her stretcher at the Matsushiro site, Major Misato Katsuragi choked as images of Tokyo-3 erupted into radiating flames on a television screen. She responded to the details with an amalgam of shame and pensiveness. The tremendous pity she felt began to seize her and she conspired within herself the redirecting of things.  
  
Of course, she felt the chiding of an inner voice, telling her that such a course of action would merely worsen her state of being. She remained defiant, impenetrable, shaped by indignation. Where she had failed - childish, helpless, inept in the face of her father's death and the origin of a monolithic conflict - she would now prevail. She girded herself with that ambition and with an oath of secrecy.  
  
She began amassing funds; embezzling them through the huge allotments SEELE threw forth in an attempt to recreate NERV as quickly as possible. They grew foolish during the disaster, stricken by the vulnerability of the Instrumentality project and easily swayed by Misato's fierce rhetoric of a newly purposed NERV, which she controlled with tyrannical precision. She guided perfunctory efforts at resurrecting the EVA program, the Dummy Plug System, the rebinding of Lilith, mollifying the old men with specious developments.  
  
In the early months, progress teetered on the edge of a prog knife. Asuka rebelled, attacked Rei in an impulse of loathing and panic. Upon contemplating her murderous overthrow, Asuka turned her hatred inwardly and followed her beloved Shinji in a more intimate manner. Angels harassed the agency with unparalleled frequency tearing new wounds in Tokyo-3, forcing Misato to abandon areas to their disrepair. Kaji was the first victim of her revisions. His role as SEELE footman and his functions within the NERV organization were terminated. The prejudice required for the act came swiftly in a narcotic haze Misato endured to conduct the act. If she could disassociate, she thought, she could do what must be done.  
  
Then, Ritsuko defiantly set herself in the purple-maned woman's path. She outwardly refused cooperation. She systematically restricted access to crucial materials and electronic files, destroyed the Rei clones, sabotaged synch tests - her capacity for disrupting Misato's efforts knew only the bounds of her ingenuous mind. Misato hesitated vaguely before she had her sunk into the darkness of an isolation cell.  
  
Days passed obliviously. Ritsuko awoke from a daze, wondering if she were any closer to death. She realized the quaking of the structure around her. Soon, the door skittered open under emergency power. A shadow crawled towards her; it flickered in a bath of fitful light. She could hear Misato draw a cautious breath.  
  
"How long will it take you to build a device - for time travel?"  
  
Another blast shook them both. Ritsuko's sagging blond locks shivered as she slumped herself into sitting position. Her mind's eye glimpsed a gulf where her and her mother's fates were indistinct from one another. She chuckled painfully.  
  
"You're mad," she told her. "I won't erase your mistakes..."  
  
The door closed, Misato's stride drew near. Ritsuko felt fingers seize her wrist and a sharp prick jabbed her arm. She cried out.  
  
"A week?" Misato asked, calmly.  
  
"What've you done?" Ritsuko nursed the wound, a moistness of blood at her forearm.  
  
"It's a sarin capsule. Delay-released."  
  
Ritsuko hushed. A hand clasped her shoulder, gently.  
  
"Please. I - I don't have a chance without... you. You didn't leave me any options."  
  
She did not answer.  
  
"Everything you've done in the past, everything that kept NERV operational has been due to your expertise - I never admitted it, but now..."  
  
"Now... now you understand that you're a failure." Ritsuko managed.  
  
The hand was removed. She could nearly discern Misato's frame, she was drawing close, her lips at an intimate distance but her words sired surprise.  
  
"Forgive me, Ritsuko. But please help me... the antitoxin is here, on hand. Would you rather just die?"  
  
"You expect me to create a functional prototype within a week?"  
  
Misato withdrew and the corridor light revealed her standing sideways in the threshold, a space suggesting Ritsuko's departure as well. Thunder thrummed the walls again.  
  
"You must," Misato said.  
  
The well surged in a fluorescence of burning violet streaks and jet-blacks. Substance and illusion marrying like liquids. Imperceptible motions proceeding like whorls of a digital flower around dark nuclei. This was the very color of existence, or at least the dye with which the fabric of time/space had been impregnated. Or would it prove to be oblivion? Had she managed to open an exit-less door?  
  
Misato decided weeks before that no matter the benefit of this venture she could not trust her friend any longer and when she pondered the self-possessed blonde inventor she was gripped with apprehension. Within the frame of the woman was genius so adept at the innovation and development of fearsome technologies that she could not further deny Ritsuko Akagi's role in the peril of humanity.  
  
"Are you sure?" Misato begged. "How can you know that those readings won't deposit me into the surface of some concrete slab? Aren't we looking into this hole from only one side?"  
  
Blue fell upon Ritsuko's eyes, the flash of readouts, her hand slowly manipulating a console, working over details of data. She was the beast at the heart of a humming, flickering, stuttering electronic warren. To Misato, she felt distant, just another aspect of the mechanics about her. This helped lessen the guilt.  
  
Serpents of heavy-duty cables and tubing spilled from the environs of the warren, each on-site sensor linked intimately to a permanently devoted CPU, and slithered across the static-free floor to the well and its grotesque spiraled cage. The cage's spin washed Misato with chill. She wanted to believe someone else stood at its edge, on the brink of entering.  
  
"Our concept of this process is a fantasy. Only the computers can objectify the reality of a hole in space," Ritsuko barely lifted away from her work. Nearly a week of imminent death and she had barely shown concern once enraptured by the task.  
  
But if I can't trust her… her inventions… after all, Misato thought, aren't devices only as sensitive and reliable as their programmer? Nothing in her life had been more wholly based on faith than the functions of technology. But her alternatives evaporated long before she consciously determined to step through a hole in space.  
  
"So…?"  
  
"So, you'll have to be patient. This isn't like macramé."  
  
Misato held back. The way she dealt with others, with her, so sarcastically – insinuating that she had no peers and that her control over a situation was supreme. Perhaps once this was the confidence that brought Misato to find comfort in her friend's presence, protection even. But those sentiments were stale long ago.  
  
Shinji thought of his shoe laces, the knitting motion his fingers accomplished as the laces unified and then fell from his hands. Limp, mundane but purposeful. He rose to meet the gaze of his guardian, her red uniform, the insignia, the beret. All vested with purpose. He felt a bit tired of purpose. Everything had some purpose – he had a purpose. He sighed.  
  
"I'm ready. Where's Asuka?"  
  
"She's taken off already," Misato murmured softly. Her note darkened, saddened a touch then. "It would seem she doesn't want to face us right now."  
  
"But why?" the question felt impotent even before she answered.  
  
"A teenage girl can be difficult to understand, Shinji."  
  
He waited. Couldn't she explain? She was a teenager once too, wasn't she? But no explanation came forth; he had other more foreboding questions anyhow.  
  
Their words collided.  
  
"By the way…"  
  
"Um… well…"  
  
"Oh. Go ahead," Misato smiled.  
  
"Are the rumors about Unit 4 really true? I heard that there was some kind of accident… and that it exploded."  
  
His voice signaled his belief that the rumors were factual. A child's eyes were too observant and astute in learning the ways of adults to omit notice of their panic, their frustration. NERV had been aflutter with such anxiety.  
  
"Yes, I'm afraid so." Misato was in her maternal mode now. "Unit 4 is gone along with the 2nd branch of NERV. It happened while they were testing the S2 engine."  
  
Pressure fell upon him. In his mind the unrealized relief of a new phalanx of EVA units was stillborn. Another angel perhaps – a surprise strike to maintain the fragile balance of power. He was weighed in that balance again and again, his value probed and stretched, his purpose metered against inscrutable intentions. He groaned.  
  
"But don't worry – we'll be alright," Misato continued. "All of our EVAs are functioning properly and our pilots and staff are in good shape too." She seemed to take a measure of peace from that herself. Her last syllable dodged upward towards gratitude.  
  
"I also heard that Unit 3 is being brought here. You're performing the activation tests at Matsushiro, aren't you?"  
  
"Uh huh. I'll be out for four days or so, but don't worry! Kaji's coming over here to take care of you guys."  
  
"But what about the test?"  
  
He was looking for firmer consolation. There was something distasteful about the whole prospect of her being away. Kaji's not so bad and all, it might keep Asuka at a distance, avail him of some lovely privacy and quiet. But who would guide him? What if an angel appeared before those days waned? Who would prompt him? Father? Something extremely distasteful.  
  
"Oh. Ritsuko will be supervising everything. There won't be any problems."  
  
"And who will be the pilot?" He supposed he should know, though the impulse to ask outstripped the value of such knowledge. She hadn't answered. Perhaps she hadn't heard him – his voice was quiet even to himself sometimes. No. There was some sort of disconnect, as if her mind was wandering and her eyes were following.  
  
"Misato?"  
  
Only for a second, as if he had faded out, as if she'd failed to see him, her eyes focused beyond him. A pit of sympathy opened inside his heart. But what could he do? He couldn't read her mind – and then she inhaled, intensely – she gasped as though she'd forgotten the name. Or didn't care to tell him.  
  
"Shinji?" she whispered. His heart flipped in confusion, he was enmeshed in her arms an instant later, a moist kiss on his brow. Her voice trembled, squealed with release. "Shinji… you're alright! I was sure it wouldn't work…!"  
  
"Rrrring." The pin-pon interjected.  
  
Misato gulped back, recoiled from him slightly. She appeared wounded, but he had not dealt the hurt and in his shock he saw the interruption as mistimed. He spoke to the door: "Yes?" and it opened with a swish. Kensuke's glasses glimmered, his breathing heavy as he bowed.  
  
"Good morning, Major Katsuragi! I've come to ask for your help! I'm begging you – please, please…"  
  
Quite mistimed. Shinji felt bewildered, words broke upon his tongue before he could breathe them. Why is everyone so loud?  
  
"…You've just got to choose me to pilot Evangelion Unit Three!" Kensuke demanded. "You gotta!"  
  
The door closed before he finished his entreaty, before Shinji could fully understand. He heard the lock fall into place. Kensuke's muffled voice was calling. He looked up into Misato's purple tresses; found her face resolute and stern. The hurt had been absorbed.  
  
He felt as though he had been dismissed to his room, though the aspect he had glimpsed on Misato's eyes now was more potent in its emotion and uncanny in its purity than any other he had beheld. Tears in her eyes, he thought and it frightened him. But how kind she had become, how coddling. He couldn't eat because of it. Cartons of delivery food steamed beside his bed - she'd called immediately upon his passing mention of hunger. The pillows she'd propped behind his head reflected not reassurance but placation and he secretly feared that she were on the verge of… of being someone quite different from Misato Katsuragi.  
  
At least, he no longer recognized her behavior. Whether she was coolly deflecting the phone calls from headquarters or petting his head, grasping his hand at the bedside – unease infected his thoughts. And now she had returned. She watched him from the door of his room, a forlorn shadow upon her face.  
  
"You haven't eaten," she mentioned in a weak voice, sniffled. "Are you feeling well?"  
  
She drew to the bed, rubbing her nose, sweeping dark bangs from her face, and presenting the best smile she could. She nudged Shinji and meekly he rolled onto his back. He submitted to the palm on his forehead but the gesture and the attempt she made to feed him from the cooling cartons discomforted him.  
  
He said her name, around a tuft of rice and tofu.  
  
"Yes," she cooed.  
  
"Won't you be late… I mean, you have that test… at Matsushiro?"  
  
She withdrew the chopsticks, looked away momentarily.  
  
"It's been postponed," she said. "Anyway, I don't need to be there. I should be here."  
  
But how would he know? How could he ever be certain that the connection between the behavior he subconsciously recognized as Misato's and the physical form was intact? Knowledge of her was a notion he always took for granted, he admitted it presently – lying was something of an occupational hazard in her line of work. But to lie to him? Wasn't that uncanny? The way she watched him too, the way her eyes sought to drink him in, the way her hands gravitated to him, touching him in feathery instants.  
  
Suddenly, the pin-pon buzzed and again.  
  
Shinji stirred on the bed. Misato sat contemplatively beside him, unmoving, ignoring the door chime.  
  
The pin-pon buzzed.  
  
"Misato?"  
  
A finger fell to her lips, an insistence in her eyes.  
  
"Aren't you…?"  
  
Misato shook her head. She chided him not to speak. Fearfully, Shinji sat up, the silence filling him like a swelling balloon.  
  
"Major Katsuragi?" gritty voice, cardboard-like beyond the muffling door.  
  
The pin-pon buzzed – now a loud rap, several strokes now, impatient with the unanswered door. Shinji could recite to himself each of the oddities Misato was displaying, did so momentarily, but found none so frightful as the chance that with this new behavior she was steely prepared to defy NERV authority.  
  
"Major, this is NERV security. Open the door."  
  
Misato had risen to her feet, poised now at the portal of Shinji's bedroom. The security officers sounded resolute. They'd have a key code for the entry, data supplied them from time to time either by Misato herself or through the agency's ownership of the residential complex, intimate knowledge of its operations in case of just this manner of emergency. What would she do then, Shinji pondered, his heart flipping, what could she do?  
  
A fleeting glance – Shinji caught the anguish focused in Misato's face, a shadow he had never seen but felt deeply, a look of purpose. Who's purpose he did not determine but for the leaps that his mind reeled through from second to second, remotely watching the woman unsheathe her service arm, kneel low against the doorframe, set her hands in a practiced configuration about the weapon, her concentration keen upon the single instant of alarm she'd impose and using it, would cut down the men outside.  
  
He yelped, tardily, as she fired. Once, twice, thrice – the packing slams, the projectiles finding their targets. A grunt and mortal sigh. Satisfied, Misato stood but instantly jerked back onto her heels. A splitting shot from the entryway slapped her leg backwards like a piano hammer.  
  
Misato muttered. She struggled to prop herself against the doorframe, dragged her bloodied leg towards Shinji. He recoiled, tucked himself into a shaded ball; tears slowly welled up in his eyes and out of anger, out of confusion, he cried.  
  
"Shinji," she calmly laid a red palm upon him. "Get up now. We have to go."  
  
end part one 


End file.
